I’ve just hit ‘submit’ on the manuscript for a book review I was invited to write for the International Journal of Wine Research on Paul Luzacs’ Inventing Wine (2012). Excellent book. I’ll post the review once it’s published. With that task completed; with this New Year coinciding with the beginning of a new three-year postdoctoral project attached […]

My valued colleague Catherine Oddie has a fondness for listicles so in the spirit of her appreciation for pithy instructive roll calls of things people absolutely must know – I offer my top five favourite wine documentaries. Each of these are on DVD and some have been cinema releases (McMan and I saw the #1 doco twice within a […]

Too much wine and not enough water – this is one of the environmental tensions of our times, and it’s in the news again in Australia this week. As I wrote in First Vintage (2012), the use of irrigation to produce wine grapes in the Riverina is a site of contestation between the people who […]

I mean this literally and metaphorically. First, the metaphorical, which – as anyone who is a fan of Game of Thrones has already guessed – entails Starkish tidings of potential doom. Sounds serious? It is. (And those who have not read or seen GoT, be warned, there is a minor spoiler at the end of […]

A date for your diary… I have the honour of being invited to give the John Turner Memorial Lecture in Newcastle on Thursday May 15. This is a major event on the University of Newcastle’s community program and I’ve titled the presentation The World in a Glass of Hunter Valley wine. In this lecture I’ll […]

When we think of alcohol and the Scots we usually think of whiskey. But Scots were active in the British wine trade. Rich traders and Scottish Enlightenment intellectuals alike favoured grape over grain. And Scots exerted a largely forgotten influence on wine growing in colonial Australia. So, as Scotland squares its shoulders for a September referendum on […]

I’m sure Max Schubert could not have imagined that a bottle of Grange (the brainchild of Schubert and a small coterie of his colleagues at Penfold’s in the 1950s) would have a role in bringing down an Australian state premier. Indeed, it is a very early Grange – vintage 1959, with an intriguing story of its own, that is at […]